These two clips I have watched every couple of days these last weeks because they really do cheer me up. The first is a song by Moluccan singer Yopie Latul from about 8 years ago but I discovered it recently, I do have a soft spot for this MOR type of music, and the other is the best song from the last cd of Congolese singer JB Mpiana.

Many people in Indonesia think people with a rather light skin are more beautiful, but in this song Yopie sing about a girl who has a skin as black as a mangistan, even so he thinks she is beautiful and sweet as rambutan.

Jamie Renton wrote:I wonder if you or any other Forumistas could help me out. I love Bob Will's & would like to discover more Western Swing style music. Can anyone suggest any other artists worth investigating?

Jamie

There are a number of Western swing compilations that don't feature Bob Wills, but I haven't really checked them out. Your question may just be the prod I need in that direction, Jamie.

I do have a few pointers for you, though. Among those playing on Bob's last recording (For The Last Time, http://tinyurl.com/2knxcm and highly recommended) are Hoyle Nix and his son Jody. I have looked for albums by Hoyle but have been unable to find any, but Jody is still playing and has a website where he sells CDs. Then, of course, there are the great Asleep At The Wheel, who have done so much to keep alive the music of Bob, and of other greats. They have made two fantastic tribute albums that have a host of guests on them, like the Dixie Chicks, the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Merle Haggard and Brooks & Dunn. I haven't followed up any of them but they all make excellent contributions. The great Johnny Gimble should also get a mention here. He started in the Texas Playboys in the 1950s and has played wonderful fiddle and mandolin as a session man on countless great tunes. He is on most of AATW's albums and is still playing in his 80s, so far as I know.

I also recommend Van Morrison's Pay The Devil and Live At Austin City Limits. He plays a mixture of covers and originals in the western swing style; that is he uses fiddle and guitars in the same way that a horn section is usually used. Bob Wills used this technique in the post-WWII era when he could no longer afford to run the big band with brass and strings that he loved.

BTW, Van's Bright Side Of The Road is another great piece to lift my mood, especially the current live version with banjo.

c hristian wrote:are these people really from Texas, and by Western Swing, are you talking about country music from country musicians made in the USA?

Bob Wills was a fiddle player, credited, by his biographer Charles Townsend at least, as the inventor of Western Swing. He was born in Texas in 1905 to a poor, rural, musical family of English origin. He appreciated the African-American music, as we would now call it, that he heard in the fields as much as the fiddle tunes he heard at home. He started playing professionally in his twenties, forming a band called the Light Crust Doughboys after the flour they promoted on a local radio station. When there was a dispute with a rival he moved to Tulsa Oklahoma where he formed the band that became the Texas Playboys.

The band, as I mentioned above, was large, including horns, strings, piano and a vocalist. (Tommy Duncan was the singer on most of their hits in the 1930s, and joined up with Bob again in the 1950s.) They mixed up the kind of fiddle tunes that Bob heard and played at barn dances as a boy with big band jazz. They had a regular spot on a Tulsa radio station and played dances all over the South West, and later nationally. They were enormously popular. It was said that when they were broadcasting in the summer you could walk down the streets of Tulsa and hear the show playing through all the open windows. Before WWII call ups broke up the band they had an enormous big band hit with Big Beaver that out-sold Bing Crosby. Bob's music, with or without horns, really swung.

When Bob was first invited to broadcast from the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville the artists performing there were what we would probably call hillbilly, and drums were not allowed. [Edit: this is not meant to be perjorative. I'm not up on the history of bluegrass, but as I understand it that is what was being played at the Opry at the time: men in dungarees playing banjos and fiddles.] Bob refused to play without his drummer, and so for the first time drums were heard at the Opry.

Bob loved horses and the cowboy life. He had a dream that the band would all retire together to a ranch. They wore Stetsons and appeared in cowboy films, putting the western in country and western, even if his influence can be hard to hear in the modern versions of the music.

If you want to hear what it's all about, Bob told Townsend that he thought his pre-war band was his best. Many, if not all of their recordings from that period are on The King of Western Swing: 25 Hits 1935-1945, http://tinyurl.com/2wu8mh. It is wonderful, as is For The Last Time, which reunited a very sick Bob with some of his original Playboys after thirty years. They made great, poignant music.